<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Laura,<div><br></div><div>I think it is definitely a good idea to get UAs – especially assistive UAs – to provide better context and structural overviews of tables automatically, though I think this represents a poor replacement for the 'summary' attribute. Allowing users of assistive technology to query table structures is without a doubt helpful. However, summary is much more about the authorial intent for the table: especially when that authorial intent is readily apparent visually. While some day in the future AI might advance to the point of interpreting such visual clues programmatically, we are definitely not there yet.</div><div><br></div><div>As an example, consider this table: </div><div><br></div><div><<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5)#Web_Forms_2.0">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5)#Web_Forms_2.0</a>></div><div><br></div><div>The author conveys a lot of information nearly instantly to the visual user. A summary attribute might read “While all four engines support 'autocomplete', one of them, WebKit, also supports 'range' and Presto version 9.0 supports all of the Web Forms 2.0 features.”</div><div><br></div><div>Although it might be possible to imagine an algorithm that could come up with some rote version of that idea, I do not think such an algorithm generalizes very well. So I do not think it can replace the 'summary' attribute (or some like mechanism). However, the ability of assistive technology to provide something like that in the absence of an author provided summary would be nice. Note too that a visual user does not need to read that summary: it is redundant with the visual consumption of the table itself.</div><div><br></div><div>In many ways this is similar to the headers work previously done. There the algorithms try to automatically associate the proper heading with its data. However, the author is still in control and can add attribute values to override those automatic associations.</div><div><br></div><div>Take care,</div><div>Rob</div><div><br><div><div>On Jun 27, 2009, at 2:48 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Hello Everyone,<br><br>Smylers and Simon Pieters have been brainstorming a table summary<br>solution where the summary is automatically generated by the user<br>agent. To quote [1]:<br><br>"HTML 5 defines which headers apply to which cells, and obviously a<br>user-agent knows which cells are merged, so possibly there could be an<br>algorithmic way of generating descriptions of table structures for any<br>(or at least a large proportion of) data tables. A user-agent could<br>have a 'describe table structure' feature which is independent of an<br>author providing a good (or indeed any) summary.<br><br>"In terms of getting the information to those users who need it, this<br>may have more success than engaging authors to write good summaries:<br>user-agent developers seem on average more likely to follow the HTML 5<br>spec than most authors, and there are fewer of them.<br><br>"If this were possible it would reduce the number of tables which<br>require a handwritten summary, reducing the burden on authors."<br>unquote.<br><br>Thoughts?<br><br>Thread starts at:<br><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/thread.html#msg684">http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/thread.html#msg684</a><br><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#144FAE"><br></font></font></div></blockquote><br></div></div></body></html>